EuroLand
EuroLand —sometimes stylized as Euroland— was the internal all-in-one editor used by the company, it was tightly integrated with custom Maya and 3ds Max plugins to edit maps and geometry. After Sphinx, the company started a new iteration called EuroLand 2, with a revised scene format and improved tools. EuroLand predates EngineX by several years, as it includes tools mentioning the original PlayStation, with the splash screen mentioning 1997-2003 as copyright years. The editor can be retargeted to support multiple "output" (i.e. export) back-ends, one of those being .EDB (EngineX DataBase) files for specific EngineX game versions.Previous developer comment: https://discordapp.com/channels/409322660070424605/409322660070424608/557487707710816256 (Discord server invite: https://discord.gg/sphinx) Due to internal strings and references we know that it was —at least— used to export assets for third-party engines in Tarzan, 40 Winks, James Bond 007: Nightfire and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Internally, the editor opens packaged binary assets in the custom .ELF (EuroLand File) format. Newer versions of the editor were made to be retro-compatible with much older revisions of the quickly expanding .ELF format. This was important because the .ELF format was not supposed to be game-specific. The only official mentions to EuroLand and EngineX before the public release of the Authoring Tools in early 2018 were from employees in CVs and LinkedIn, some tidbits were "leaked" and published in mainstream newshttps://kotaku.com/dead-space-extraction-guiding-its-way-to-ps3-xbox-360-5554809 about Dead Space: Extraction's PS3 and Xbox 360 port. Some footage of EuroLand appears in the Making of video. Features EuroLand has a MDI interface where multiple .ELF files can be opened simultaneously under the same instance, each file appears as a document window where its contents are laid out in a hierarchical tree. By double-clicking an item type one of the several sub-windows will open with additional functionality. Graph Editor By looking up in the EuroLand source we can see how it is supposed to work; to insert new points in the Graph Editor (for particles) you just have to double click on the line. To delete a point in the curve you can either press the Del key or right click on it without moving the cursor. You can select and move them normally by clicking and holding the left mouse button. If you press Shift or Ctrl the movement will snap/be locked in the horizontal (time) and vertical (value) axis, respectively. We probably should document this into the wiki in the future, but at least the knowledge is out there. You can pan the view by dragging while holding the middle mouse button. The scroll wheel works normally for zooming in and out. There has to be at least two points in the graph at any given time, so the first and last one are locked. There's an additional feature for only zooming vertically or horizontally by holding Ctrl or Shift, respectively. That should be it, I think. Lots of tiny details that aren't explained anywhere. Map editor Right-clicking a trigger circle when selected in the top-down view will push it down against the solid geometry. This is useful for aligning triggers against the ground. Command-line arguments EuroLand supports outputting EDB files directly in an automated fashion by using special launch arguments. As well as doing batch work and running .ELM files to programmatically control the interface and do all kind of things. See the included EuroLand macros for inspiration. usage: EUROLAND opts filename where options are: /o ALL - Output All Targets after loading /o targetname - Output Target after loading /m macrofile - Run Macro after loading /d - Disable automatic document loading /? - Help Default hot keys Hot keys can be configured individually in each sub-window by pressing F1, or by opening the global dialog; locate the Hot Keys button in the left bar, under Options ''(next to ''Project ''and ''Global). Many commands and actions are unassigned by default and not present in any menus, the only way to access most of the functionality is to map it depending on the workflow for each artist. Here are the default values as shown in the global dialog, for quick reference: References Category:Game development